Harumi Befu

Structural and Motivational Approaches to Social Exchange

In our daily life, we constantly encounter situations where we are giving favor and assistance in return for something else received in the past, or in anticipation of receiving something else in the future. This may be as simple as a smile in exchange for a smile, or morning’s greetings for morning’s greetings, or it may be a dinner invitation for a favor done. The notion of exchange, or reciprocity (see below for a conceptual distinction between these two terms), is so pervasive in our everyday life that we generally assume its operation without stopping to think about it. As we assume reciprocal behavior in our own daily life, in ethnographic reports of other peoples, too, anthropologists generally accept the same assumption. When they describe, for example, payment of cattle for a bride in East Africa, offering a gift in India to earn spiritual merit, exchanging favors between compadres in Middle America, giving a ceremonial necklace in return for an arm shell in the Trobriand kula ring, and potlatching each other by Kwakiutl chiefs, ethnographers are assuming the operation of some reciprocal principle. It is, in fact, probably safe to assume that in every society some form of reciprocal principle is operating, and that for every individual some of his behavior is governed by some such principle.

Call for world association for Japanese studies

The level of our scholarship on Japan as a whole can be enormously enhanced, I submit, by eliminating such neighborly ignorance, and instead by promoting cross-fertilization of ideas from colleagues in different regions of the world, where radical differences in conceptual and theoretical thinking and cultural and historical legacy have produced diverse kinds of Japanese studies, creating a variety of views of “Japan as Other.”

Not so permanent “permanent employment” in Japan

Rodney Clark. The Japanese Company. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979. x + 282 pp.

Asian‐American identity in a white melting pot

17.50.

Globalization Theory from the Bottom Up: Japan's Contribution

Christie W. Kiefer. Changing Cultures, Changing Lives. San Francisco: Jossey‐Bass, Inc., 1974. xxiii + 260 pp. Figures, bibliography, and index.

Origin of Large Households and Duolocal Residence in Central Japan

12.95. Melford S. Weiss. Valley City: A Chinese Community in America. Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman Publishing Co. and General Learning Press, 1974. xvii + 269 pp. Figures, tables, and references

On the Margins of Japanese Society: Volunteers and the Welfare of the Urban Underclass

4.20 (paper).